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politics
Can We Disarm Our Binary Politics and Look for Shared Solutions?
How do we transcend our collective awareness beyond the artificial borders we’ve created?
Nov 24, 2024
If you want to play the game of politics, here’s step one: Reduce everything to a linear political viewpoint: “right” or “left.” No matter how deep and large and complex that viewpoint is, politicize it, turn it into something that’s either right or wrong. It’s all about winning or losing.
Did U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris lean too far left? Oh gosh. Neither Liz Cheney nor Taylor Swift could save her.
I’m still immersed in my own recovery process—recovery from the election, of course. And yes, I’m feeling pain because “my side” lost, but my emotions are complicated by the fact that I didn’t really have a side in the election. It wasn’t simply that I was frustrated with the campaigns and claims of both major parties (the only ones that mattered, right?). I’ve apparently reached a point in my life where the entire political game feels problematic; it minimizes our world in a way I can no longer tolerate.
I feel the need to embrace and transcend this paradox: the reduction of our deepest values to a “cause,” which then frees us from actually having to honor those values and reduces the process to winning vs. losing.
How do we transcend our collective awareness beyond the artificial borders we’ve created? I ask this question not from some higher state of awareness, but from the middle of it all. How do we reach a collective state that isn’t competitive? How do we actually live our values rather than simply attempt to impose them—and in the process of doing so, oh so often, completely disregard and violate those values?
Suddenly I’m thinking about the good old Crusades, summarized thus by History.com: “The Crusades were a series of religious wars between Christians and Muslims started primarily to secure control of holy sites considered sacred by both groups. In all, eight major Crusade expeditions—varying in size, strength, and degree of success—occurred between 1096 and 1291. The costly, violent, and often ruthless conflicts enhanced the status of European Christians, making them major players in the fight for land in the Middle East.”
Now it’s all just history, which is the story we tell about ourselves from one war to the next. But, come on: “violent and often ruthless” battles to reclaim, good God, holy sites? Do unto others as you would have them do unto you? Actually, that biblical quote sums up the cost of war pretty precisely. But the paradox sits there like an open wound. Love thy neighbor, love thy enemy—but first you’re going to have to kill him. And his children. Charge!
I’m not saying all this simply to point a moral finger at the political leaders of the world. Rather, I feel the need to embrace and transcend this paradox: the reduction of our deepest values to a “cause,” which then frees us from actually having to honor those values and reduces the process to winning vs. losing. Apparently, we can’t have a cause without an enemy, or at least an inconvenience (Palestinians, for example), which... uh, needs to be eliminated.
It always seems to come down to this: some glaring irritation that stands in the way of the good we want to do. And yes, there are many pushbacks against this mindset—many people who, in defiance of the cynics, believe in, practice and, indeed, create loving and courageous approaches to conflict resolution. But such approaches cannot be reduced to simple stories of good vs. evil, and thus lack large social resonance.
So here I am, dealing with my own frustrations in the present moment—the ongoing genocide in Palestine that the U.S. funds, the possibility of President-elect Donald Trump’s increased militarization of our southern border, the ever-intensifying climate crisis, the ongoing possibility of nuclear war... and oh my God, it gets ever more insane. For that reason, I bring back a story I wrote about a decade ago, which remains close to my heart. It’s a small story: a single incident in the midst of the brutal civil war going on in South Sudan.
It involves the international peacekeeping NGO, Nonviolent Peaceforce, which had several of its members in the country to help facilitate communication between the various sides in the conflict. They were unarmed, of course, which gave them credibility and trust among the warring sides. As I wrote at the time:
Being unarmed doesn’t mean being disempowered. This is worth paying attention to. In South Sudan, unarmed, international peacekeepers have credibility. They stand above the local conflict, facilitating communication between the various sides but not taking sides themselves.
What happened was that armed men attacked a United Nations base on the perimeter of the city of Bor, where thousands of civilians had sought refuge. Two Nonviolence Peaceforce representatives found themselves in the middle of the chaos and took refuge inside a mud hut, which was occupied as well by four women and nine children. On three separate occasions, I noted, armed men came and ordered the peacekeepers out so they could kill the women and kids. The peacekeepers refused, holding up their Nonviolent Peaceforce IDs and saying they were unarmed. They were there to protect civilians and would not leave. After the third time, the armed men left for good.
Some 60 people were killed in the assault, but 13 precious lives were saved. As one of the peacekeepers said afterward: “I think if we had a gun we would have been shot immediately.”
The peacekeepers had had intense training in nonviolence and were able to keep their cool. They didn’t panic.
And, crucially, Nonviolent Peaceforce had credibility in South Sudan. They stood beyond the conflict. “We also had a humanitarian mandate,” one of the peacekeepers said. Being unarmed “opens the doors to look for solutions. If we were armed peacekeepers, the solution is you shoot back. Because we were unarmed, we could find other ways.”
This story transcends the moment of its occurrence. I wish I could multiply it by a million. All I can do is repeat: Being unarmed opens the door to look for solutions.
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I Was Attacked by an Owl and This Is What I Learned
I projected my desires and perspectives onto the owl without endeavoring to understand the owl’s perspective, something all to common when we approach people with differing viewpoints from our own.
Oct 06, 2024
Last month I was walking through the woods by my house at sunset when a nearly fully grown juvenile barred owl swooped over my head and landed on a branch in front of me. I was awestruck by this gorgeous bird and began doing what I’ve always done with wild animals who do not flee from me: I talk to them. We looked at each other for a long time before I decided to move on. The last thing I said to the owl after a nearly 10-minute one-sided "conversation" was, “Good night. I love you.”
Moments later, I felt a blow to my head, after which the stealthy culprit swooped to another branch to stare intently at me once more. I crouched down to grab a stick to hold above me in case the owl came after me again and slowly backed up to return home, where my husband, a veterinarian, could tend to my bloody talon wounds.
I’d heard about barred owls attacking people, but I never imagined I would be a victim. After all, I’m an animal advocate and humane educator. But I had misread everything. I was chagrined to realize that I’d been under the illusion that we were enjoying each other’s company.
Dangerous Assumptions
Just as I had misread the owl, I sometimes misread people, mistakenly assuming we’re on the same page. I often think I’m being understood, and that I’m understanding, when I’m not. This is probably true for most people. After all, it’s hard to ignore the escalating and dysfunctional levels of polarizing discourse in our culture, where mistaken assumptions and miscommunication are ubiquitous, adversely impacting our ability to come together and effectively nurture a truly healthy, inclusive, collaborative society. As playwright George Bernard Shaw once said: “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”
Every time we make assumptions, there’s a good chance we’ll be miscommunicating and misperceiving, limiting the opportunities for real communication.
There are so many assumptions that prevent effective communication. We may assume that someone is religious because we are believers (or vice versa). Or we may inquire about someone’s astrological sign because we think astrology is a legitimate science, foisting this belief system on others without a second thought. When we meet someone who grew up in the same neighborhood we did, we may ascribe similar values and political beliefs to them. And when we meet people from different backgrounds, we may assume their values differ from ours and treat them with less openness.
I have friends who, thinking they are being generous, believe that supporters of the presidential candidate they abhor are simply “duped.” Other, less generous, friends think such supporters are either “selfish” or “stupid.” Some of my Christian friends think nonbelievers like me are “going to hell.” Some of my atheist friends think those who believe in God have a “mental disorder.” These are the actual words and phrases some have used in my presence.
Such assumptions arise effortlessly as we project our thoughts, beliefs, and emotions onto others. Unfortunately, this habit narrows our perspective and limits our ability to truly understand the complexity of others’ lives and minds. Every time we make assumptions, there’s a good chance we’ll be miscommunicating and misperceiving, limiting the opportunities for real communication. When we jump to our inevitable conclusions, we trade the possibility of true understanding for a false sense that we have communicated effectively.
Changing the Conversation
There’s a way out of this failure to communicate. It starts with something so natural to humans, and so obvious, that it hardly seems worth mentioning except for our seeming unwillingness to embrace it widely. We must cultivate and act upon our innate curiosity and desire to learn. In so doing, we eclipse a darker human propensity for "us vs. them" thinking, which leads us to perceive "the other" as a threat.
To communicate effectively with people who have different perspectives and beliefs, we must be eager to learn about those perspectives and beliefs. That means asking questions with friendliness and a true desire to understand rather than debate. It means striving to understand why someone holds a belief or position. What fears, experiences, or values drive their thinking? It means that when we hear something that challenges our worldview, we resist the urge to argue or correct and instead lean in with curiosity. In this way, we become better able to cultivate empathy, a foundation for understanding. In an increasingly polarized world, understanding becomes not just a moral imperative, but a practical one. Without it, divisions are likely to grow.
One of the lovely side effects of bringing genuine curiosity and openness to others is that we are likely to discover points of agreement. As we find those places where we can agree, division dissipates and the ties that bind us strengthen so that we can find places to collaborate. Coalitions to solve problems are usually more successful when diverse groups of people come together across divides to achieve shared goals. Whenever we allow side-taking, rather than collaborative problem-solving, to be our endpoint, we miss the opportunity to make our communities, nation, and world better.
The Role of Fear
One of the obstacles to making curiosity our default mindset is fear: fear of animosity and violence; fear of what society would become if others’ perspectives took hold; and sometimes even fear that we might be persuaded by a different perspective, which could threaten our existing identity and relationships. These fears are readily fostered in our society and sometimes within our families and communities. They may also be reinforced by our experiences. Since my encounter with the owl, I now enter the woods at dusk with some trepidation. Gone is my unadulterated joy and openness in the presence of these birds. Yet, my new fear is also a reminder that curiosity is indeed the gateway to understanding.
How to Move Forward
Had I spent a little more time cultivating my curiosity to better understand barred owls, I would have learned about their territorial nature, a trait we humans share with owls. I would have known better than to talk at a bird who had just flown low over my head and was perched staring at me, less curious than baleful. I wouldn’t have made the bird feel threatened by my refusal to leave their territory. I would have understood and been able to put my empathy into action by quickly moving along.
What would putting empathy into action look like with our fellow humans? A good first step might be to stop fomenting hostility, derision, and insults, whether spoken aloud about "others" within our perceived in-groups or on our social media. Whenever we make fun of, express hatred toward, or trivialize the perspectives of others, we perpetuate polarization and reinforce divisive thinking. This is not to say that we should make nice when someone intentionally says or does sexist, racist, homophobic, xenophobic, antisemitic, Islamophobic, or bigoted things. What it means is that we demonstrate respect for others’ divergent perspectives that stem from different lived experiences, sources of information, and long-held values and beliefs.
One might think these commonsense suggestions would be widely welcomed and adopted, but we’ve become so habituated to polarization that we often unconsciously stoke it. It’s not as if most people want to offend and be subsequently attacked, but nonetheless we regularly project our beliefs onto others and fail to consider the impacts of doing so. I projected my desires and perspectives onto the owl without endeavoring to understand the owl’s perspective. Reflecting upon the experience has made me wiser about how I might show greater understanding not only in situations with wild animals but also with my own species. Perhaps we can all learn something from an owl attack.
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Love and the Blue Pearl in the Time of Harris and Trump
We cannot continue to evolve if we don’t know who we are, and that includes knowing who we are politically. We are not the clichés of state. We are not its lies and atrocities.
Sep 01, 2024
Can politics be equal to the deepest of who we are? Can humanity evolve beyond war?
Such questions — I know, I know — are never officially asked during a presidential campaign. That’s not the point of the election: to plunge philosophically and spiritually into who we are. And thus, as the Trump-Harris race proceeds, not too many people (besides me) will be bringing up Pierre Teilhard de Chardin — Jesuit priest, theologian, scientist, best known as the author of The Phenomenon of Man — who died seventy years ago.
But I can’t tolerate the clichés of state! So let me sneak a dozen or so of Teilhard’s words into the present moment: “Love is the only force that can make things one without destroying them.”
Love? To those who are beginning to feel their cynicism percolate, I ask you to bear with me, at least for a moment. We’re stuck with that word, “love,” to describe humanity’s sane and positive reach; its understanding that we’re connected to the whole planet, as well as to each other, and a social structure that blows off this truth is certain to bring about its own collapse. Doesn’t it make sense to talk about this, right now, as we’re forging tomorrow politically?
Here’s another Teilhard quote. This one is pretty well known: “Some day, after mastering the wind, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we will harness for God the energies of Love, and then for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”
Harness the energies of love? What in God’s name could this mean, especially in Teilhard’s context: that doing so would have evolutionary significance? I fear we don’t have a word that gives adequate impact to his words.
OK, in her acceptance speech as presidential nominee, Kamala Harris did toss in some love:
“So, fellow Americans. Fellow Americans. I — I love our country with all my heart. Everywhere I go — everywhere I go, in everyone I meet, I see a nation that is ready to move forward. Ready for the next step in the incredible journey that is America.”
Basically, she’s saying that she feels love for an abstraction, defined by random border lines on a map, created via several centuries of land and people theft and is now, wow, richer and more powerful than any other abstract political entity on the planet. To “love America” requires, I fear, instantly creating an us-vs.-them world.
Yes, she adds, this is “an America where we care for one another, look out for one another and recognize that we have so much more in common than what separates us. That none of us — none of us has to fail for all of us to succeed.”
OK, wonderful, but all this empathy stops at the border, right?
“And America, we must also be steadfast in advancing our security and values abroad. As vice president, I have confronted threats to our security, negotiated with foreign leaders, strengthened our alliances and engaged with our brave troops overseas. As commander in chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.”
America’s president can’t just be lovey-dovey. But what if Teilhard is right: “Love is the only force that can make things one without destroying them.” This is where I fall off the edge of American politics. We have, in essence, a trillion-dollar annual military budget. We’ve played war or proxy war all over the planet throughout my lifetime, including right this moment, as we give Israel the means and freedom to wipe Gaza off the map (otherwise known as “defend itself”). This is not questioned in the halls of power. This is not questioned in the American electoral system.
What if, as a nation — as residents of Planet Earth, as caring participants in humanity’s creation of tomorrow — we . . . uh, meditated? What if we dug, collectively, deep into the human soul? Not possible, the cynics cry, the snarks hiss! But I refuse to believe them. We cannot continue to evolve if we don’t know who we are, and that includes knowing who we are politically. We are not the clichés of state. We are not its lies and atrocities. We — all of us — are participants in deep, profound change.
So let me take a moment to offer, to candidate Harris and even that other guy, this tiny treasure I came upon in the wake of my wife’s death from cancer twenty-six years ago and my brief foray into Eastern religion: the blue pearl, a term I came across in a book by Swami Muktananda. Basically, it’s your innermost reality. While practicing meditation in my own so-so way, I was certain this was something I’d never find. But after my wife’s cancer diagnosis, it suddenly seemed as though it had found me. Some years ago I wrote in a column:
“The blue pearl is mortality’s unit of currency. It’s passed between the wounded like a secret handshake — secret only because the polite constructs of everyday life require discretion, averted eyes and an allegiance to the fiction that we’re strangers. The blue pearl has no tolerance for this, because the truth is, we’re ‘strange’ to each other only on the surface.
“Thus, when my wife was diagnosed with cancer, I noticed a charged change in conversations. For instance, here was my friend Herb, constructor of crossword puzzles, divulging that he’d lost his son in an accident some years earlier. I was his editor; we talked routinely on a weekly basis, but not till now had there been room for such a disclosure in our amiable chats. His telling me this was like a warm hand on my shoulder — ‘Yes, I too am mortal’ — and gave me courage. This is the blue pearl.”
I’m certain the blue pearl is more than just a personal discovery. As Swami Muktananda has put it: “After the Blue Pearl stands steady for a while, it explodes. Then its light spreads throughout the universe and you can see it everywhere.”
This is the tomorrow that’s at stake today.
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